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The interface problem is unsolved. My argument that it's necessary and the IP-based guess is insufficient has two reasons: First, often there's a local, state,
by kristopolous 10y ago
The interface problem is unsolved. My argument that it's necessary and the IP-based guess is insufficient has two reasons:
First, often there's a local, state, and international language. This is endemic in India but also exists elsewhere. In Barcelona for instance, there's Catalan, Spanish, and English.
The migrants to Barcelona generally know at least one of these; such as Turkish and Catalan, or Arabic and Spanish. So what do you display? The Catalan version? Spanish? English?
You can find the differently-scoped languages in unlikely places; in Mexico for instance, Nahuatl has 1.4 million speakers and Yucatec has 759,000. That's about the population of San Francisco. Not a small number.
Second, international migration is only slated to increase. In Los Angeles, the neighborhoods of say Huntington Park (pop 58,800) and South Gate (pop 95,677) are 97.1% and 94.8% Hispanic/Latino respectively while Monterey Park (pop 61,085) is 86.3% Asian/Pacific Islander. The Burbank/Glendale area has the largest population of Armenians outside of Armenia. Over 50% of LA residents don't speak English in the home.
So for these cases, is defaulting to the state language a better user experience than fixing the language selection process?
- greggman 10y agowhere did you get your stats? I agree la has large communities of immigrants but > 50% of LA residents don't speak English in the home? that's certainly not the impression I get there.
- kristopolous 10y agoFrom https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-185.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-185...: Los Angeles metro area * At least 185 languages are spoken at home. * 54 percent of the metro area population age 5 and over speak a language other than English at home. ------8<----- A likely deceiving interpretation of this is that it does not say "exclusively".
- bigbugbag 10y ago> So what do you display? The Catalan version? Spanish? English? You let the user choose. A big missing component of international websites is the UI to let people choose the language they want instead of guessing for them.
- badestrand 10y agoThe user obviously should be able to switch the language, for example in the header. But you have to display the site in some language on the first visit. Or do you want to show three big flags and nothing else? The internet would get annoying very quickly.
- oblio 10y agoI'd venture to say that displaying the English version with a clearly visible flag selector would be good enough in 99% of situationa.
- int_19h 10y agoJust use whatever their OS locale is. We have a mechanism to communicate that from the browser to the website (which, so far as I know, browsers actually use). And if a person prefers a specific language according to their locale setting, chances are good that they'll also prefer that same language for websites, more often than not. If it's not the preferred choice, at the very least you know that they can read it, and find the language selector.
- JshWright 10y ago> So what do you display? The Catalan version? Spanish? English? Whatever the accept-language header is set to.